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The second event was dinner at the Hande household. All intelligent women. Gargee, now in grade 7 sang “The hills are alive” from the Sound of Music in her beautiful voice. Confidently maintaining total eye contract with me. I told her that she would be my next “Maria” for sure. It was a very moving experience for me. 
Mrs Hande, a research scientist, now working in management in the insurance industry (based in Australia) was also so interesting to talk with. She starts her shift early, getting up at 3am to match the Australian time zones. With her mother, she cooked us a delicious meal. 
We also received beautiful India shawls as gifts. 
The third event was a group with Sidhee and her friends from the university magazine, interviewing Terrell. 4 hours and 2 pizzas later, I think they had some great material. 
Then there was the Sikh Uber driver who had lived in Australia. He was quite OK with Lahore. This is the question that gets asked, by me, as a somewhat anxious mother and a son heading off there. 
And we also saw a movie in a luxury theatre, called “The 15.17 train”. About a train shooting on the way to Paris, which was interestingly, acted by the actual people involved in it.
Pune 13 – 20th February
Not exactly sure when we decided to add Pune to our three-month travel of India. Sidhee was a computer student of mine in Dalian a very years earlier, she is one of the few people out of more than seven-billion people on earth who liked some of my textual-photo-art I have been posting for years and making eBooks of, so of course, she was at the top of my list of people to visit. My artist sister has liked some of my stuff too, (thinks sis) and that is for the world. Enough of me (as some would say). Visiting Sidhee and her family was a stop that we are glad we made. As Narda spoke of above, she had her sister in chorus and we had met their parents at the Chinese school. I had been communicating with Sidhee for at least six-months prior to leaving Adelaide for suggestions for our India trip.
Pune is not a tourist city, for example, our fridge at home is covered with magnets from places we have visited (the front and the sides – we may need a new fridge soon for more magnets) but in a week I did not find one. Perhaps the first place ever not to find one. Not being a tourist city gives a great chance to be local. However, saying all that…there is one tourist type that comes here. The 1970s ashram loving group that followed Rajneesh, an Indian spiritual guru, considered as a Godman; the Orange People, were a world-wide hippie-seeing phenomenon. Rajneesh later changed his name to Osho which is how he is referred to now. The Osho Centre is in Pune, near where we stayed. There was a rather large group of his followers in Adelaide. From 1981 – 1987 I was a tofu maker (really – see http://tofu.neuage.us/) and they were one of my customers. They did not have a very favourable reputation in Adelaide. In Oregon they had an even worse reputation. Wikipedia goes on to say “Rajneeshpuram was an intentional community in Wasco County, Oregon, briefly incorporated as a city in the 1980s, which was populated with followers of the spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram He did have 93 Rolls Royces (here is an image of them); which he said allowed him to “ride in a tranquillity that compares with the peace by Buddha,” he was escorted out of the country at some point – interesting reading.
We are staying at Laxmi Sweet Homes.
This property also has one of the best-rated locations in Pune! Guests are happier about it compared to other properties in the area. Couples particularly like the location — they rated it 9.0 for a two-person trip. This property is also rated for the best value in Pune! Guests are getting more for their money when compared to other properties in this city.Nevertheless, Rajneesh is popular where we were staying. The people in charge of our airbnb let us know that they were his disciples. One of them liked to give long winded discourses about their hero. We brought up the scandals and Rolls Royces but our man-on-the-ground, in his purple robe defended the dude and said his many books he wrote are the thing to run one’s life by. We did not go to the ashram itself as not only is it expensive, but you have to pay for an HIV test on the way in because of their ‘touch therapy’ and etc. they are known for. There was a large poster of Rajneesh on the wall next to our bed that we put behind a chair, as well as posters, cards of Rajneesh’s sayings around the flat. I never did get a fridge magnet. Bottom line, Rajneesh is still going strong even though the body of Rajneesh has left (which is how they say it). Our host said there was a big party as they cremated remains where tossed into the Mutha River across the street from us.
On our second day we crossed the bridge, got on a random bus and said we wanted to go to a shopping centre. The conductor found a seat for Narda, on a crowded bus, and after twenty-minutes or more stopped in the middle of the street in front of a large western style shopping centre, Phoenix Market City, we were nervous about getting off in traffic but realised there was no other way to get across the street. Narda found several women at a stall and managed a bit of discourse with a couple of them.
We were in hope of finding an English film but there was none available, so we just enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning in a large modern mall that had more people working in shops than there were customers in the whole place. Not knowing which bus to take home we got a tuk tuk, auto-rickshaw, home.
As Narda said above we had a few times with Sidhee including a lengthy interview with me about technology and life in general. As one who is not a stranger to talking, especially about myself, I thoroughly enjoyed our visits. Sidhee will be one of the folks at the centre and head of technology. She is studying computing and is taking an interest at university in bio-tech which is our future. I totally expect here to come up with nanobots that will make my brain better, perhaps helping me to download my brain, well, parts of it, so I can re-upload an enhanced version of it. Considering I am now seventy, I am putting a bit of pressure on Sidhee and her generation to get on with it. She wrote an article for her school’s magazine P.I.N.G titled ‘RNA nanodevices, programming living cells’, so she is well on her way. https://issuu.com/p.i.n.g./docs/ping13.1_digital_ pages 29 - 30. Sidhee’s mum made a tasty dinner and the family gave us a lot of information about India and politics. I do not recall it all, hoping it will be part of my ‘enhanced-brain-of-the-future’ that Sidhee will construct, soon.
We had our interview lunch at the Yogi Restaurant, a short walking distance from our flat. It is expensive and caters to ‘our type’ with pizza and the like. Another day we took another random bus, telling the driver we would go to the end of the line, which was a dirt road with the usual mixture of farm animals, people and vehicles. 
Not being intimidated by not having a clue where we are we proceeded forward. A few blocks later we were in an upcoming new housing residential real estate projects in Keshav Nagar. Dozens of twenty or so floor apartment buildings. I forgot to take a photo so just picture a lot of very modern buildings amongst old market stalls, dirt roads and farm animals. It reminded us of when we lived in Dalian, China, where there were so many new apartment blocks tossed about the landscape. Wondering what they looked like we went into an office and said we were interested in viewing an apartment. When asked where we lived we said Koregaon Park (which is the trendy area filled with Ayurveda centres and ashrams) and the agent I suppose thought we were local enough and she showed us through. The apartment was quite large with ten-foot ceilings, a couple of balconies, and of course I asked if there was a gym/fitness centre, so we were showed that and the swimming pool. The three-bedroom apartment was twenty-five thousand rupees ($383 USD) per month rental and the two-bedroom was 19,000 ($291USD). I was interested in the three-bedroom apartment and being so cheap, outside of living on a dirt road with farm animals and our having no intentions of living in Pune, at least at present, I thought we had landed a great deal. We took her card and got a tuk tuk to a nearby shopping centre for lunch.
The below shot is not of the apartment we looked at, it is a building I liked in another section of Pune.
Another day; they tend to blend on holiday, we took Uber to the old section wandered around, took some more random buses, found the Bund Garden cinema to watch “The 15:17 to Paris”. The theatre was ultra-luxurious with five rows 8 seats per row, totally reclining seats like a flatbed on a plane. Large and comfortable – 350 rupees ($5.37) for the two of us.
Next stop Trivandrum
I also do this blog at our India site which is located at http://neuage.org/india and is often more up to date than this as we are too busy exploring where we are or reading. Currently Narda is reading, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” and I am reading “Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow” both by Yuval Noah Harari. I have already read the book Narda is reading. We love these books and recommend them to everyone. Any time left, which is little I post my photo textual work at https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/E_6JaB
I post my daily thoughts at http://neuage.org/2018/